Sustaining Members’ News
Dyalog Ltd
Thanks largely to the quality of the speakers and the enthusiasm of the delegates, the inaugural Dyalog User Conference was a great success and was thoroughly enjoyed by all who came. One of our objectives was to showcase the range, scale, and sheer brilliance of the many successful APL applications written by Dyalog customers, and we thank all speakers for their excellent presentations. We will definitely be running the conference again next year and we hope that it will attract even more interest. For the Dyalog development team, the feedback and informed discussions about potential future enhancements to Dyalog APL were particularly useful. As evidence that we take notice of your suggestions, the Editor enhancement, that was voted number 1 by conference delegates, was available to DSS subscribers only 2 weeks after the conference ended. Following the conference, there is now an independent and enthusiastic Dyalog user discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyalogusers in addition to the three mail groups which we administer ourselves. See http://www.dyalog.com for details.
On October 3rd, we announced a new release (10.0.3) of Pocket APL which is fully compatible with Pocket PC 2003. Even better news is that on the ubiquitous XScale processor that powers nearly all current models, Pocket PC 2003 runs Pocket APL up to 3.5 times faster than Pocket PC 2002. This should open up even more APL applications to the Pocket PC market.
At the same time, we have released a 30-day free trial version of Pocket APL. The trial version is functionally identical to the $39.99 download, so Pocket PC users can evaluate the complete Pocket APL package, with absolutely nothing to pay. In addition, the product now includes a toolkit for creating packaged applications, ready to be uploaded to Handango or other on-line distributors. The toolkit may be used to produce free-trial versions as well as full commercial products. Creating and distributing APL applications for the Pocket PC could not be easier.
Causeway Graphical Systems Ltd
Along with lots of other APLers, Causeway greatly enjoyed Dyalog’s first annual conference. Oddly enough, we even sold a few copies of our Desktop version of GraPL to long-time RainPro customers. I suppose I should have expected this, because even I now tend to prototype examples in GraPL and save them out as Dyalog or +Win functions. It just saves so much typing – when we have autocomplete on property names in classes, I might go back to the APL session again! Anyway, if anyone out there wants a chart design IDE to help build RainPro charts, you can buy GraPL from our website for all of £40 and then mail Causeway for the free APLFN plugin to clipboard your designs as APL code.
Getting a solid build of Grapl.NET in C# remains the priority. We have trial versions on about 6 customer sites at present, and apart from a few minor details (like that damned style character getting mis-translated) it all just appears to work. It is strange how the market has suddenly shifted - following all the .Net hype 2 years ago, almost nothing happened in the ‘real’ world until this summer. Then Microsoft shipped Windows 2003 Server (with full .Net support) and almost overnight the market for COM components died, and existing customers started mailing us to ask how the .Net build was going. We need to be there with something we can trust, and so far APLScript looks the best bet. Look out for a progress report in the January Vector.
MicroAPL Ltd
Version 2.0 of APLX was previewed at APL2003 in San Diego, and will be released soon on Windows, MacOS and Linux. Amongst the enhancements will be the ability to create new APL tasks from the menu bar, with multiple session windows, each with its own workspace.
You will also be able to create new APL tasks under program control, either wth a session window, or as invisible background tasks. Signals can be used to communicate between tasks, and you can share variables between them. Full details will be given in the next Vector.
In the mean time, we have released an update to APLX for Linux which fixes an incompatibility with some recent Linux distributions including RedHat 9.0 and Mandrake 9.1. The update can be downloaded from http://www.microapl.co.uk/apl.